If your EHR is connecting through a Ctrix environment, you will run into one particular issue with Dragon Medical practice edition 2: fragmented text into free text areas in the EMR. When Dragon is used on a local application like Microsoft word, there is no problem. Any application that doesn’t require access through citrix will work. The only work around that the programmers at Nuance provided me with is to use the dictation box and transfer text (there is also a button you would check to keep the text in the clip board). Alternatively, the programmer told me that you can get the network edition of Dragon—but it’s much more expensive (you must license the server for about 10K and each client access license, aka: CAL or user, for around $2,200). This would have to be done through nuance directly. I’m more than willing to show the physicians how to use the dictation box to transfer the text, as it is an easy enough work around that still saves physicians plenty of time.

Dragon Medical works with most windows-based EHRs such as Epic®, Cerner®, GE®, McKesson® and many more listed below which self-report compatibility to EHRscope.com. Note that EHRscope.com is not a Nuance-sponsored site, and therefore Nuance has not validated claims made by vendors regarding compatibility with Dragon Medical.

Dragon Medical Practice Edition can help you avoid penalties, and get you financial reimbursement for meeting the criteria for “meaningful use”. The article below details the transition toward EMR usage and what is expected to come within the next year or so….

Kyle Wayland

Federal EMR Electronic Medical Records Mandate 2014/2015 Deadline

There are various views regarding President Obama’s ability to ensure that all medical records in the United States are converted into the electronic format by 2014 but there is no denying the fact that an increased adoption of EMR or electronic medical records by physicians, healthcare organizations and their related business associates is now a gradually-progressing certainty.

A rather recent legislation further underlines the initiative for moving onto the electronic platform of storing patient medical records—called the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act or the ARRA. This legislation is aimed at creating more funding and a network of incentives that can be directly resourced towards healthcare professionals or physicians who are ready to adopt EMR and abide by the concept of “meaningful use” of Electronic Medical Records by 2014.

The year 2014 is also significant from the perspective that from 2015 onwards, penalties are likely to be levied on entities dealing with patient healthcare data unable to upgrade themselves to electronic record technologies. Legislations like the ARRA and the entire campaign promoting EMR is based on the principle that electronic records provide the combined benefit of securing patient information and cutting down healthcare costs—two irrefutable advantages.

It should be noted that the proposed penalty in 2015 is of 1% and this is likely to increase incrementally, up to 5% in the forthcoming years. Most of the penalties will be levied in the form of reduced Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements. To engage appropriate funding, all entities applying for the EMR healthcare funding should understand and prove “meaningful use” of patient medical records and the use of “certified EHR” technologies. This essentially means that the EMR vendor chosen by a healthcare provider/clinic or its business associates should comply with regulations that have been put forth in this niche, such as the standards set by the Security Rule of HIPPA.

The government is very serious in terms of ensuring that the conversion rate to EMR technologies is appreciable and that is why along with grants and federal funding, more college-level programs aimed at creating more Health Information Management professionals are likely to be introduced as 2014 draws near. This will ensure that the impending explosion in electronic records numbers is addressed with the availability of qualified professionals—further helping to reduce the overall costs for employing healthcare computer technologies and easing the entire process.

Glen Tullman, CEO of Allscripts, believes the practice of medicine is about to change. “Your iPad, your voice, and your hands will be the new input devices for the EHR of the future,” according Tullman. He said in an interview at the HIMSS conferencethat we’re reaching the point where physicians will soon be able to talk to their computer, get immediate access to all the patient data they need, and even pull up the latest clinical trials. “That’s coming within 12 months. It’s doable today,” he said.

So the future of medicine is about to arrive. What exactly will it look like? It will include not just voice recognition software–which has already been mastered by companies like Nuance Dragon–but voice recognition combined with natural language processing. That marriage, as explained in a recent article by Fritsch for Advances, will not only convert a physician’s spoken words into text, but will generate meaningful, structured information that can populate allergy checkboxes in an EHR, for example, thereby speeding up the clinical documentation process.

Equally impressive is the ability of voice recognition/natural language processing to let a clinician’s speech activate a clinical documentation system, or a picture archive and communications system (PACS), or even put data into these systems with free form dictation. Think: “Go to allergies checklist,” or “create a new office visit, ” or “insert standard review of systems.”

But perhaps the most futuristic capability of such “collaborative intelligence” tools is their ability to keep doctors fully informed of relevant patient data already in the electronic records system.

This video contains a brief demonstration of Dragon Medical Practice Edition 2 used within OmniMD– highlighting a fraction of the available features and functionality of these two powerful applications.

Most of the native commands built into Dragon will work in any word processing environment, including the text entry windows within an EMR. Additional functionality which is fairly universal, such as the ability to click on a button, close a window, or open and select something from a navigation menu, will also work within an EMR. There may be special functions which you might want to accomplish within an EMR and which are not built into Dragon. These are generally easy to create and can be done so by Speech Recognition Solutions or a speech recognition champion within your practice.